Caterpillar Is Reusing Its Mining Autonomy Playbook for AI and Putting $100M Into Retraining 118,000 Employees

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CTO Jaime Mineart told TechCrunch on August 30 that Caterpillar is applying two decades of mining automation experience — automated haul trucks, drilling, underground loaders, dozers — to the messier problem of jobsites and quarries, backed by 1.6 million connected assets and more than 16 petabytes of structured data. The company is spending $100 million over five years to train its 118,000 employees in AI, autonomy and robotics, and already uses AI agents internally to modernize legacy code, generate and test software, and catch defects earlier. Mineart's framing is the useful part for builders: "the hard part about autonomy and about physical AI is incorporating that technology into the customer jobsite and into the workflows," not the model.